How the Internet Became Hell (with Whitney Phillips)

29:01There's so much worse than us. They're poisoning our gene pool. Well, then at the same time, they're like the most powerful group in the world that is controlling everything. So all of that is familiar. I think the thing that I'm really stuck on is like this point of secularization that you talk about. Because the right wing in this country, probably all over the world, but specifically, I'm familiar with it. But like the MAGA movement is like this very strange alliance, right? Where it's like, there is this religious evangelical contingent, right? It's like a lot of these themes come from there.

29:37But the person at the head of this movement is, everybody knows. Trump is like an extremely secular figure and like a major portion, half, more than half than this coalition. I think they're very secular in their philosophy, but the overall effect of their messaging and their ideology comes off as religious. Like, how does this happen? How are they able to hold both things? Yeah, it's well, I mean, it's I think the existing paradigms that we have to talk about our politics are inadequate to describe the weirdness of this particular moment. So when people typically try to account for religious influence in the United States, they default to concepts like white Christian nationalism, which, you know, is about positing, we want a theocracy.

30:26We want to have, we want Christian rule, essentially. And a lot of people use that to sort of vaguely talk about MAGA with the kind of complication that, like, Donald Trump doesn't want that. Like, that's not, Donald Trump isn't a, he doesn't want a theocracy. He doesn't read the Bible. He's not a religious man. And so there's already this just immediate kind of glaring, like you're trying to ascribe this framework to a group, to a movement that is actually not very religious, but they act religious. And part of the problem is the assumption when you're talking about white Christian nationalism, who's the center?

31:03What's the center of the universe if you're talking about Christianity? God and Jesus, right? And so then the idea is, if you're talking about a movement that is motivated by white Christian nationalism, then by definition, people's conceptualizations of self and their relationship to their religiosity would be through love of God and Jesus. And that has nothing to do with what we typically see in religious expression. When we're talking about this very sort of secularized weird version, then instead, this sort of paradigmatic flip where rather than talking about how does love of God and Jesus explain Donald Trump, which it clearly doesn't, how does fear and loathing of the liberal devil explain it?

31:46And so then instead, you can then square the circle sort of where you've got a bunch of people who go to church and identify as evangelical, who support a man who is very clearly just not a religious person, not a pious person, but everybody hates the same people. So it's not about sharing. It's not that they love the same deity. It's that they hate the same enemy. So what Trump does and what Trump has been able to do is he's really good at and has been very successful in tapping into hatred of a particular amalgamated amorphous enemy. And to your point about this is kind of similar to what we've seen before in anti-immigrant sentiment, anti-Semitism, where simultaneously you minimize the other, and then you also make them really dangerous.

32:35The difference right now is that, so if you're talking about immigrants or, or, you know, anti-Semitism, you're talking about specific identity categories, like an anti-Semite hates Jews. And so like being a Jew is one of the markers that makes you the enemy, right? Being an immigrant is what makes you, what marks you as the enemy. But what happens when the devil doesn't actually have any consistent markers. So it's, it's taking all of those markers, but it's, it's disconnecting them from the specificity of race or even the specificity of politics. I mean, look at what has happened to Marjorie Taylor Greene.

33:13Like you have these people who should not be in any way targeted by MAGA because they are, they are all of the identity categories that are, that would, you would think would protect them, but they're not protected because what this amalgamated enemy process does is it makes all the details totally irrelevant. And so it's basically, you know, Marjorie Taylor Greene can become the liberal devil. That's the world that we live in. And that's what makes it so strange. And so trying to apply existing frameworks, white Christian nationalism to Trump, to MAGA, it's always going to fall short. It's never going to explain what we're dealing with because it's just fundamentally misdiagnosing what has happened two part question about that one is i know that you're a student of folklore because we're talking we're talking about the right and we're talking about the secularization and kind of what i'm gathering is that we can call it religion it could be organized religion but it's it seems to me that we're we're none of us are freed from like religious thinking even if we consider ourselves secular and we've been talking about the right and the left is like a as a passive player here and in a victim in a sense but like what what is the left's role in this like how do you see them reacting or even to be uh like devil's advocate i suppose like the theory that it like it takes two to tango uh what what is the response right because it's like the left is not just sitting there and taking it.

34:50There is kind of a response. How would you define it? How does this fit into this like religious thinking? Yeah, no, that's a great question. So in the current book project, so the book, the previous book is telling the historical story of where does the liberal devil come from. The current book project, which I'm finalizing, is it's the cultural history of the first year of Trump's second term. In talking about the liberal devil, part of the kind of underlying concept is the notion of demonology, where demonology in an anthropological context is this sense that there's this amorphous evil. You can't really place it, but you know that you're afraid and it's threatening all the things that you hold dear.

35:29So anti-liberal demonology is that exact idea, but applied to the left or liberals and in this really amalgamated kind of a way. And so the first book, Historicizing Demonology, the second book is explaining the popular demonology? How is it that a lot of these ideas about what a liberal is, what the left is, has been absolutely internalized and metabolized by people who identify as liberal? So the way that I approach it in terms of religiosity, so William James was a 20th century philosopher who talked about the varieties of religious experience and was really interested in the kind of, I don't know, prophetic experience, but also acknowledge that religion can be small.

36:14And he just was less interested in the small stuff. I'm more interested in the small stuff. The big stuff, the like the very, like if you apply the idea of variety as religious experience to varieties of demonological experience, which is how it's conceptualized in the book, you can look at someone like Pete Hegseth and he's like a fundamentalist, right? His religiosity is just camp almost, like high camp. But then you have people who express a kind of sympathy for the liberal devil. You see this a lot in news reporting where people will be, journalists will be reporting on whatever thing Trump is saying, amalgamating all these different groups of people subsumed as liberal.

36:55You know, it's transgender for everybody. It's DEI, it's XYZ, whatever. And he just kind of refers to it all as liberals. And what these journalists do is basically say like, yeah, he's talking about a group of people. They sort of are co-signing the actual insanity, the sort of semiological psychosis of putting all of this stuff together that's not, it's not partisan. A lot of it has nothing to do with each other. And yet that is what makes up the left. And when Donald Trump talks about it and other fundamentalists talk about it, a lot of people just kind of take it for granted that, yeah, that's what it means to be a liberal.

37:30And so you just sort of buy into it. So the, the, the reason that demonology is increasingly popular, and I think increasingly dangerous, it convinces a lot of people who identify as liberal that, yeah, they are in a cosmic clash. Yeah. They better fight back because they're attacking us. Like it's the tendency to look at the crazy amalgamation of things that are not related to each other and saying we, when talking about it. And I did, God help me. I did a close reading of the Hexeth confirmation hearings and you saw several members of the, of the democratic committee members when Pete Hexeth would sort of talk about, or when they would quote his book and his books, I had to read them.

38:12And they have all just the wildest list of things. And then you had people, you know, saying like, how can we expect you to work with us when you talk about us in this way? And you're like, us, who are you talking about? So there just is this lack of reflection on why the words we even use. And when we buy into those words, it just becomes so much easier for the for this for the nuttiness to kind of persist. And then everybody is walking around hyperactivated because you've got people who see themselves as liberals feeling threatened with good reason, especially after everything that happened in many.

38:50Like there are reasons why people on the left or liberals would feel under siege because they are. And so then, of course, yeah, you want to fight back. You want to push back. You want to call out the troll and you want to react to what the what the White House is doing. The problem is that doing so mints liberals. that when you're pushing back against the, if you are Liz Cheney, if you are Marjorie Taylor Greene, doesn't matter who you are, if you push back against Trump or against MAGA, congratulations, you've created a new liberal. And that's actually what the administration wants through their trolling, is all every successful troll that they do creates more liberals.

39:30And the more liberals there are, the more justification there is to literally put troops in the streets. So this is not just a conversation about rhetoric. It's not about words. It's about what the words do in the world and the world that these words sustain and make terrible. I just had an epiphany as he was saying that that it feels like and we don't have to like play around like I identify as left and it seems to me like the experience of the left is almost entirely about categories being imposed on you by the right and then trying to like manage that categorization right. It's like, you come to politics with your beliefs and convictions, but then somebody said, oh, you all think that trans women should be able to compete in sports.

40:27This is a story that we didn't cover, but it's like, there was this teacher at some school, this might have been in Canada. It was a trans woman, and she came to school and she had extremely large, comically large fake breasts. I don't know if you saw this story. And obviously it caused a huge controversy. And as a quote unquote liberal with that label being applied to you from the right, your entire being becomes about like managing the situation, which is like kind of secondary or parallel to your politics. but it's like your entire being is about kind of managing these problems that are handed to you by the right that has painted you.

41:13Like that is all of liberal discourse. That is all of what the Democratic Party is doing is kind of managing those impositions, right? And this is an unfair question to you, but I'm going to throw it at you. It's like, what do you do about that? Oh my God. Yeah, no, I know. Well, I mean, I think that naming is always an important first step. It has to just be the first step. But what you're describing, it's something that I've thought a lot about. And there's a literary concept called synecdoche. And it's the idea of parts for whole. So people who will talk about wheels when what they mean is car or the crown when they're talking about like the British royals.

41:52And what you have is this really intense synecdoch. I don't know if that's the correct pronunciation or if that's a word, but it's when you have one liberal thing, it's actually referring to all the liberal things. And so an individual liberal, leftist, whatever, never is just speaking for themselves, especially when they are speaking in public. It's like if one liberal or leftist says something, that is what it means to be a liberal or leftist. And you saw that play out really powerfully related to trans stuff in the 2024 election, where, you know, sure, there are some activists who have positions on trans issues, but it was like the fact that that got connected the fact that that's true of some activists who would identify with the left well then that means that Kamala Harris is for they them and not for you right like it Kamala Harris was the recipient of and was this became for the right a sort of avatar of everything that was happening in every network of leftist activism that existed on the internet and you're like Kamala Harris didn't even really talk about trans stuff very much But then it just became this orthodox position that all Democrats are like, all they care about is trans stuff in a way that's very threatening and very annoying.

43:08And after the election in the postmortems, you had so many Democrats then say, we have to purge our concern about trans people. We can't care about trans people. We're too woke. We're weak and we're woke and we can't do that anymore. because the fact that some people on the left take some positions means that everybody is responsible. All liberals and leftists are responsible for what all liberals and leftists everywhere say. I mean, even just think about comms and it puts the Democrats or people who are anti-Trump in such a difficult position in terms of how do you frame the Democratic Party given that.

43:43So the synecduty of it all is very challenging and it means that a liberal is responsible for all liberals. And it means that when a right winger is or when Trump points at a particular issue, it's like you touch one part of the paracosm, the sort of like narrative landscape in which all of this happens. You touch one part of it and the entire thing lights up. And so trans people in particular have become this like embodiment of everything that's liberal and leftist. And so, and so it's, and it's powerfully dehumanizing because not only are they basic trans people have been kind of reframed as being this like abstract noun.

44:26So the trans experience gets talked about as if being trans is radical indoctrination. Like that's not what a trans person is, but, but they get sort of amalgamated and, and dehumanized as this abstract concept. And then worse, they get purged. They get exercised from the party, not even as people, but as like religious fetishes, essentially. And so again, like the weirdness of all of this just can't, you can't really capture the weirdness of it without, you know, doing all of this kind of ecological, big, big, overwhelming, terrible thinking. Were you tuned in to the discourse after the election about what the Democrats need as a liberal Joe Rogan?

45:16Sure. What do you think about that idea about like having some sort of like viral messiah that can kind of change the tone of the network? Is that a pipe dream? Is there like some structural reason or aesthetic reason in liberalism or leftism where like that, that makes it not possible? What do you think about that question or that idea? Well, I don't know what a liberal is, number one. So, I mean, doing this work, what it's really made me really think carefully about is how do I use language and how do I understand these kinds of things? So, you know, I, if there were a liberal Joe Rogan, I mean, number one, I'd be sort of nervous because whatever positions that person took would then be because of this synecdoche kind of dynamic, then that would like, I guess, be attributed to all liberal slash leftists.

46:08And I don't know if that would be necessarily positive. I mean, I think there definitely needs to be alternative channels for information dissemination, right? But having a liberal Joe Rogan, that doesn't actually solve the structural problems. In some ways, it might just, you know, create another facet of the rhetorical problem of like, who the hell is a, who could speak for liberals? I don't know what it is. I don't know what that would mean. But instead, you know, what I would see is very beneficial. I mean, it's what you guys are doing, but other sort of media companies are trying to do, which is create alternatives.

46:47You don't just have right-wing capture of information and you don't just have sort of mainstream capture of information, especially because so much mainstream reporting right now is really, really, really going hard into demonological framings. Like they're, they're doing a lot of this stuff and there have to be other voices, but hopefully there's lots of other, lots and lots of different voices to emphasize the idea that one person could never speak for liberals. One person could never speak for leftists and we wouldn't want them to. So give me a thousand pro-democracy Joe Rogans. Like that's what I would actually, you know, call for rather than the Messiah leftist.

47:28leftist yeah i think that can work in a world where things are trending to an internet and media that's more pluralistic and there's definitely signs of that happening but um it's it's not clear that things will break that way right like on the one hand you have people like us, like Hellgate, Defector. There's this rising group of smaller publications with more voices that are not bigger than any one huge media company, but all together have quite a voice. But on the other hand, you have continued gigantic consolidation. The social media platforms are still huge. And I guess that kind of like...

48:18We went on a long and terrific detour, but to go back to this AI question, I see that as possibly a pressure on big platforms that could break them. But I guess, what does your internet consumption look like at the moment? I'm really curious. And as a scholar of all this stuff, how have you experienced the last three years of AI swap? What has that done to your internet consumption? um i do everything i can to protect myself from it i mean so to the point about media and media fracture so kind of bringing these two threads together you've got a lot of independent media outlets some some bigger some smaller um that maybe they identify as leftist maybe they just identify as an alternative to the right or an alternative to mainstream so how you would even classify them might be a little bit complicated in the sort of pro-democracy space.

49:22You simultaneously, though, have a lot of that same kind of proliferation of smaller, medium-sized outlets happening on the right. You know, you've got, and that speaks to the kind of mega civil war to the extent that that term is accurate. But you've got like a lot of factions over here and a lot of factions over here. And then you've got the sort of mainstream factions, which are quietly also getting weirder because you've got media, you know, when you're talking about the acquisition of media properties by Trumpists who are installing people to basically do demonology at CBS News, like there's a lot of weird stuff happening.

50:05What that creates is where, and I see this a lot with my students, where are we supposed to get our information? That to follow politics, you really have to try that it's not going to come to you. And if it does, you're not guaranteed to get good information just because of the way that things have changed, even in terms of who has access to the White House briefing room. So it's more increasingly difficult to find your niche. Your niche exists, but how are you going to find it? It's just harder to be an informed citizen in the world because of all of this fracture. There's no center. And when there's out of center that can cause problems.

50:43Now, then you overlay the issue of AI slop and just the proliferation of so much more information that's just so much stupider, that's like confusing and redirectional and stressful and overwhelming. All of that gets back to this overarching conversation about, you know, big plank of ecological thinking is what is my body doing? Like, how is my nervous system reacting to this world? And I will certainly speak to my students they don't always know where to get their information. And when they do get information, it's often overwhelming and strange. And if it's not the sloppiest of the slop, it's at least confusing about its origins.

51:23And so what you're talking about is a media ecosystem that is not particularly geared specifically for radicalization, although that does happen, but it's geared for setting people into a dysregulated nervous system scenario. And the more dysregulated your nervous system is, the more overwhelmed you are, the harder it is for you to parse good information from bad. And the harder it is for you to have motivation. And so when you think about all the people who just are desperately trying to escape this moment or just, I don't know, like people aren't doing great, broadly speaking. And I think that the media environment overlaid with the AI slopperation is it all kind of feeds into each other where if we're not okay here, like in our actual bodies, how are we expected to figure out how to navigate an objectively absurd, chaotic, often nihilistic, confusing media landscape?

52:29Like those things, a dysregulated brain does not do well in that kind of environment. And we have an environment that is geared towards dysregulating our system. So that's where the question of, well, what do we do about it? I mean, the questions, and we have had this conversation off and on for a thousand years, that part of the challenge is that the challenge is so big. And part of what has happened over the last few years is that those challenges have gotten bigger. Nothing has improved. Things have retrenched and gotten more, confusing. The questions have gotten bigger. The solutions have gotten further away.

53:09And people's nervous systems have gotten more frazzled. So that's where we are in 2026. And we could have predicted it and it was like moving. It was trending in this direction all the time. But being here is worse than... It's not that I expected it to be better, but being here is not great. I know that people love to say there's this refrain online where people say like, I'm exhausted, right? It's like you post something that's like a stupid video or like a Trump did something and you're like, I'm so tired. And it's just like this thing that people say. But if I am to describe like the overall effect of the AI swap, it is exhaustion.

53:50I consider myself, you know, and I'm sorry to like pat myself on the back like this, but it's like a very savvy media consumer. I've been reporting on AI about deepfakes for years. I'm on the forefront of that stuff. I think I'm very good at figuring out what's real and what's fake on the internet. But there is so much of it now. And you're doing it basically every second. Every post you see, you are using your brain to decipher, like, is this bullshit? Is this even a real image? And I can figure it out. But eventually, it just drains your executive function. It's like there's a limited amount of energy that you have and you you it will tap you out now because it's it's so easy to create this fake stuff and it reminds me of this was back at motherboard sam wrote uh and we did this in response to this feeling it was called every day is april fool's day now and yeah and it's just like april fools is like this terrible day online it started out as a fun thing all these companies used to like do these gags but then over the years it got really exhausting because it's just like it's a bad day to be online because you're like well i can't trust anything because like this is the big day of jokes.

54:59And now every day is like the big day of jokes. And it's extremely exhausting. Well, and when that is the only coherent policy coming from the White House, is like embracing that and just trying to mess with people. Again, because it's part of this broader comm strategy of minting liberals through trolling. I've been teaching a long time now. And And my students don't know that this is not what the world has always been like. And so they have a nervous system that's sort of calibrated to this. And I have to remind them, like, guys, this is not, it wasn't even like this three years ago or four years ago, but they only know combat sensationalism.

55:41They only know slop. They only know exhaustion. They only know stress. And that, you know, I'm worried about a lot of things. but I think that the underlying worry that I have is the solutions the way that we can think through this the way that we could try to broker different kinds of conversations like it or not this is a still at this time a pluralistic democracy we've got to figure out how to be in it together you can't really do that when you've when you've got this dysregulation and all of these media systems and structures that are essentially calibrated to keep people in a state of fight or flee or freeze because within a democracy, fighting like excessive fighting is problematic enough.

56:28Fleeing is worse because it means that people are not going to be having doing the hard work that is democracy. We can't do that in our present media environment. So I worry more than anything about, about like bodies because the body, if the body is not in a good spot, then all of the other thinking, all of the other solutions, all of the other problem solving becomes cognitively so much more difficult. And you experience this in an extreme way because it's your job to every second of the day have to parse what is real and what's not. But that's an experience that just an average college student has.

57:05That's what it means to be digitally mediated in this moment. And it's not sustainable. So I think that really taking seriously the dynamics that are at play and really, really understanding historically how we got to this moment and how difficult that makes calms. Like even if you know, okay, this is going to make me, whatever it is I'm saying now, this is going to make me sound like a liberal. And it means that I will instantly basically become a devil trigger to another person. knowing that or at least anticipating that as a possibility, how can it make you think differently about your message?

57:46How can you try to connect to someone on a different way? Or how can you try to understand the bigness of that enemy in someone else's mind? You know, we've got to take these things into account. And we haven't been in part because our frameworks risks disallow us from actually getting to the root of what's happening. So we got to do that. Step one. And then we got to figure out how to take care of ourselves. And I think those two things go together. And I don't know how to do it. So that's a very happy note to end on. Yeah. I guess if I can, one more question. Or maybe I'll try to squeeze in two even.

58:29But I was surprised by how pragmatic and specific your book is. Again, with Ryan Milner, Share Better and Stress Less. I really recommend that people read it because I don't know what people are imagining. But there's very specific examples and thought experiments in the book about... You're in a group chat and somebody does this. It's like, how should you react? And why do people have this effect? And it's rare for people to talk with so much thought and detail about the dynamics of something like a group chat. But that's our life. So I really recommend that people check it out for that reason.

59:07The reason I bring it up is the book is very focused on what you are doing in your life to make the ecology of the internet around you better and to not be a polluter. but as you know i'm sure like in uh thinking about climate change popular thinking in recent years has shifted from oh it's really important to your to that you recycle to like well individual responsibility is not going to really solve this issue and in fact it's on it's it's unfair and perhaps even like propaganda to make people think that like their individual acts in their lives can actually fix climate change and i think the same is probably true about the internet right it's like so what do you think about that like do you think that it's the same is also true about the internet yeah no right like not using plastic straws is better but it's also not going to solve climate change like individual action is better if you're if you're trying to be responsible but it's not those are not systems and structures i mean what i would say i think about this from the vantage point of a of a college of an of an educator you know my i teach a media ethics class and so much of the, of the, it's actually taught through the lens of true crime, which assumes a lot of sort of violent imagery.

1:00:25And so we talk about various kinds of things, not just podcasts, but like Charlie Kirk's assassination and, and what happened in Minneapolis. And what do you do when you're confronted with images, videos of violence? Like, is it always good to share? How do you think about what the right thing to do ethically is? And so the, that conversation, the ecological conversation is always front and center, but at the forefront of that is telling them how their brains work and explaining to them that if their brains are in this dysregulated state, they're not going to be able to think ethically about the media that they consume or produce, and they're not going to be able to engage fully in civic life.

1:01:03Those are the two things you can't do when you are dysregulated. And this matters because I'm teaching in a school of journalism and communication. These are future communications professionals. They're going to go into PR and marketing and journalism and media studies, depending on the path that they end up taking. But there are people who are going to be in the workforce, who will be making the decisions, they'll be pulling the proverbial levels or levers within institutions, within media companies. How do you get them to understand ethics in a way that is ecologically grounded? So it's not telling them, you know, don't ever post a meme that's problematic.

1:01:47It's understand how you relate to this environment and bring that into the workforce. And because the, what is gone wrong is at the, I mean, it's individual, but it's structural. It's at the level of companies and institutions and networks. How do we populate those companies and institutions and networks with a different kind of body, with a different kind of awareness? And that solution does not happen overnight, but it's about education. It's about training. It's about helping people understand the role that they play in much bigger systems and structures. And I think that that's the only way you can do it.

1:02:25But that's a long-term goal. And the question is, are we going to have enough time? Got it. Yeah, that's what I wanted to hear. I basically just... I was thinking about my group chats and how some of them can be inappropriate, but also some of the nicest, most caring places that I have as a person. So it's good to know that we're still able to post the occasional spicy beam responsibly. It's also like to that point, connection, friendship, support. These things are the kinds of things that help us downregulate. And sometimes, you know, we got to talk some shit and be silly and play with our friends.

1:03:12This moment also needs joy. You know, it needs people who are connected to each other. And that can look a lot of different ways. So it's not, it isn't just about how do we fight this as individuals? That's, that's always a problematic way of approaching this, but it's, we are truly in this together. And if there's one takeaway from the idea of ecological thinking, it's, it's that. Okay, Whitney, thank you so much. I can talk to you for hours more. We should do that again in the future. I will leave it here for now. As a reminder, 4Four Media is a journalist founded and supported by subscribers.

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